Oh, Please, Mr. Mailman, Won’t You Bring Me Something Good?

I love my genealogy periodicals, as y’allwell know. Perhaps I’m a bit obsessed with them as well, but that could be because I’m an avid and somewhat compulsive reader. Or just nosey, but who’s to say?

I confess that each quarter around the time I expect the National Genealogical Society Quarterly to be published, I begin checking the NGS web site every day to see if the latest one is available. I revel in the fact that the Association of Professional Genealogists posts their quarterly online, and that the Executive Director e-mails an announcement to the APG list when it’s ready for viewing. And the back issues of many excellent journals available through such worthies as the New England Historic Genealogical Society, there for the reading whenever I have a few spare moments! But I’ll not expound upon that subject again.

What I love most is receiving crisp new copies of my favorite reading material in the mail. Every quarter, and sometimes more frequently, the mailman delivers these lovelies right to the bottom of my driveway, many encased in plastic or paper envelopes to protect the glorious contents. On those days, I race to work, shoo everyone off, shut myself away in my office, and take at least a few moments to savor the feel of paper, the smell of the freshly minted page, and the hope that this time, perhaps, my family or an associated one will make an appearance within.

When I’m expecting a particular issue and it seems to never arrive, I often walk away from my mailbox with a disappointed slump. As the days drag on and I open the hatch to find only junk mail and bills, I reach around and pat the inside, just to be sure, and can’t help myself from entertaining an inkling of a notion that my mailman is sitting in his car right at that moment enjoying my copy of A Lot of Bunkum. Dratted mailman, I say with my fist raised in the air as the traffic whizzes by, I curse you and your journal-reading ways!

But the next day, as if by magic, the long-awaited periodical arrives in the mail, seal unbroken, and I laugh off my suspicions. Oh, Dawn, you silly goose, I think, to suspect the mailman of such a thing. And then I receive another e-mail that a new issue is hot off the press. As I trundle down my driveway each morning thereafter, I stare at my mailbox with suspicion and some weighty consideration. Would a camera catch him in the act? And really, how much could one guard dog eat?

Yet there he is, the much-anticipated issue in one hand, the other raised in a friendly wave, and all is well in the world.